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Initial Half-Life 2 Benchmarks Released
dfj225 writes "According to an article on ExtremeTech.com, it looks like ATI has the lead in Half-Life 2 graphics card performance. Valve benchmarked their new game using the top cards from both ATI and nVidia. Results show the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro drawing around 60 FPS while the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra only draws around 30 in Half-Life 2's DX9 full precision tests. Read the article to see results on other tests that Valve ran." Update: 09/11 13:06 GMT by M : Another article about the presentation.
What a terrible article. It didn't even say what resolution all that was happening at.
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60 fps is more than enough for a 1st person shooter. I doubt you can tell the difference against higher frame rates, i know i can't.
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OTOH, it *sounds* as if you need "An 800 MHz P-III and a DX6 level hardware accelerator (e.g. TNT)." -- Gabe Newell, Valve Software General Program Manager
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...such a test.... the results are here third graph:
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Also, the Planet Half-Life Screenshot Gallery, a page with a huge number of interviews with Valve staff and previews of the game, and Videos. The huge one is awesome.
September 30th! I can't wait!
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Half Life 2 is DX 9 only.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
No, they are not. There was an FAQ put out a while ago with the answers officially from Valve, and they were asked if a Linux port would be coming out. They said no, and there were no plans to do it at all. However, if Transgaming aren't all over this game the moment it comes out, I'll be very surprised.
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Actually, if you bother to read the god damn article, you'll find that your 4600 (and my NV28 4800) beat the NV30 cards when the DX9 gubbins is turned off. Given that Valve are saying that it'll run on a DX6 or later card, it looks like this'll be a viable option for us poor bastards with 6 month old hardware.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yeah, the drivers that come in the box are always horrendous. The drivers that came with my Asus card always crashed my system. Even the newest ones from the Asus site were horrible. No matter what card you get, if it's an nVidia, always use the detonators. Otherwise performance will be horrible.
Any self respecting Half-Life player always keeps it in OpenGL mode, especially if it's in the land of NVidia.
That may be true for self-respecting Half-Life players but what about the self-respecting Half-Life 2 players? You know, the ones that will be playing the new game that will be running on a new engine? What do they have to say about this issue?
Nothing. Because they don't exist yet - the game needs to be released before there can be tribal knowledge about the optimal hardware configuration.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
Not true
synthetic benchmarks have been showing that the geforce FX has poor directX 9 performance
just everyone dismissed them because they were synthetic benchmarks
FYI
Which is why, I'm sure, that every single real DX9 benchmark has shown nVidia falling far, far behind ATI.
The quotes from that second link are particularly damning -- and they're from a variety of companies, including id Software, not just Valve.
I've never owned an ATI card. My last 5 or 6 cards in all my computers (and my wife's) have been nVidia. My next card is almost certainly going to be ATI though because they're currently the performance leaders. I have some reservations about drivers still -- not with performance or stability but with long term support since ATI has still failed to deliver a unified driver architecture -- but I'm unwilling to sacrifice that much performance while still paying a higher price.
Frankly, at this point anyone who is still wondering about the validity of the benchmarks is deserving of the title "nVidia fanboy".
This is simply not true. While it may not have OpenGL support (I'm not sure on this), it is NOT DX9 only. Valve has confirmed that the game will run on hardware that supports at least DX6.
(mind you, there's just been a new driver release from ATI, and I haven't installed that one yet)
I've got a 9700 Pro, and the ATI drivers have given me *a lot* of grief as a developer. There are many times when they are so blatantly non-compliant with the OpenGL standards, it's not funny.
For example, the driver claims to support OpenGL 1.3. With 1.3, ARB_multitexture has been promoted into the core, so they driver _should_ export glActiveTexture & friends without the ARB suffix. Well guess what? It doesn't. You have to use the *ARB versions of the functions.
I guess that a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that ATI is not as long in the Linux driver business as NVidia, and overall, things have in fact gotten better over time. But you should expect a bumpy ride.
Direct X works that way. You can write the game in DX9 and it will use hardware functions for whatever it can and software for all the rest. However, the game itself will be DX9 only in that you will have to have DX9 installed in your PC to run it even if your graphics card is only DX6.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them
Nothing going for them? Uh... do you know anything about nVidia's history?
nVidia was formed from disgruntled SGI employees. You know, the same SGI that created OpenGL and pioneered 3D graphics on computers? Yeah, that one. Why were they disgruntled? Because they had gone to the powers that be at SGI and said "you know, we could make a buttload of money off our technology -- we can make cards that do a large subset of the OpenGL calls and sell it to the PC market for cheap!" SGI management was all about profit margin though, and there's a lot more margin (although not as much profit) in selling a few cards for $50-100k than there is in selling hundreds of thousands or millions of cards for $150-450.
So a bunch of the top SGI graphics engineers left and went off to make their own company. The first few cards released by nVidia were actually OEM'd cards from another company. IIRC, the TNT was the first silicon and code from the ex-SGI engineers, and it was not "butt ugly with a handful of problems" by any means. There were initial problems with running 3Dfx only games (as in, it couldn't...), but Quake and OpenGL remedied that issue. The GeForce completely blew away 3Dfx and they never recovered.
Oh yeah... that little bit about them being ex-SGI engineers? Well, it came back to bite them. SGI sued the hell out of nVidia and it wound up being settled out of court. SGI retains options on advanced features in the silicon and drivers. One of the many reasons that the drivers can't be open sourced.
It seems that nVidia is now suffering from the same problem that plagues a lot of hot tech companies -- many of the primaries have made millions of dollars and decided they don't have the need/desire to work there anymore. So they retire, cash in their stock options, and then go pursue other interests, which robs the company of not only its top engineers but also its visionaries and leaders. The last couple generations of cards from nVidia appear to be due to this. They may come back still, and they're still better off than 3Dfx was, but they've certainly fallen from the lofty heights they used to occupy.
He should've said "Half Life 2 is DX only" -- yes, there are code paths for DX6 up to DX9. There is no OpenGL support in Source, and Gabe Newell has said repeatedly that there never will be any.
Maybe because HL2 is a DX-only game?
And, yes, OpenGL is inferior to DX at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 fixes most of the issues (particularly in the shader department), but it's far less mature than DX9 is.
And while DX isn't immune to vendor-specific code (see the discussion by Gabe Newell on this and NV3X in HL2, or the shader issues that occurred in DX8), MS is making efforts to reduce or eliminate those occurances. I suspect we'll see some pop up as DX9 becomes more mature, but they'll be resolved in DX10 just as the DX8 issues were resolved in DX9.
I'm not a MS fanboy, but the reality is that you can get a hell of a lot more support if you develop for DX than for OpenGL. That matters to a lot of developers. The downside is that you inherently limit your platform choices... but the reality is that there's 3.5 gaming platforms out there right now -- PC/Xbox (1.5), PS2, and GameCube. Porting anything between them is a virtual rewrite of the graphics engine anyway, so portability isn't a huge concern. The Mac and Linux markets are essentially non-existant.
well, because film has that motion blur inherent in the media, so you can have the lower framerate and your eyes won't notice. Meanwhile a computer screen has no blur, its pretty much a slideshow on crack. Therefore human eyes on a "digital" display media need 60fps to see smooth continuous motion. Or at least that's how it was explained to me years ago when people were complaining why does it matter if this card can do 100FPS in quake 2 and this other can do 120 when 60 is all you can see.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
OpenGL is ahead of DX and always will be. You get faster access to new features through vendor extensions and often better access to them.
You may be able to access more advanced features, but that also ties you down to writing specific code for each card you want to support. That's a freaking nightmare. API's are supposed to help you avoid doing that. As I said, both OpenGL and DX have had issues regarding this, but OpenGL's issues are far more prevelant and pervasive than DX's are at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 will fix a good bit of this, but it's not out yet (no.. it's not... all the pieces are in place but it hasn't been ratified yet).
or instance Carmack has talked about how he is better able to access some of the advanced shader features on Nvidia cards through the OpenGL exposed elements than through MS's DX9 interface which was coauthored with ATI
He's also commented on how miserably slow the nVidia cards are with the higher shader functions, even after dropping the precision back to 12 or 16-bit (compared to 32-bit in DX9, which ATI supports fully).
Hell, read the TechReport's discussion on HL2 and nVidia -- spending 5x more time optimizing the NV3X codepath than the generic DX9 codepath and still not even reaching the generic's performance is not a good way to spend your time. If I was a game developer (I'm not) I sure as hell wouldn't do that for most cards. The only reason Valve or id did so for nVidia is because they are such a huge market segment. Do you think they'll be looking at any optimizations for S3 or Matrox? Doubt it.
Until ATI stops writing crappy drivers and prematurly killing still sold hardware I won't be supporting them.
Same. Which is why my next card is probably going to be ATI -- they've ceased doing either of the above. I'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them, but their drivers and support have been very good for the past couple years. Which also happens to coincide with them firing their entire driver team. Which also occurred at the same time as the utter lack of driver support you reference. The new team seems much better about actually doing their jobs.
Except that these optimizations are choosing FOR you to drop detail settings. Yeah, the game says you have X, Y, and Z special options, but your driver is doing otherwise.
On top of this, these "optimizations" are degrading visual effects pretty seriously according to the article by taking away important effects.
back when Voodoo was king, and stand alone 3d accelerators were common. While the Riva128 was ugly (especially in comparison to some of the other choices out there) it was fast. and it was fast at higher resolutions, the Voodoo 1 did 320x200. where the riva 128 would get comparable framerates at 800x600, not to mention the fact that it could do 32 bit. (at a huge performance decrease however) The Riva128 was a good 2D card to hook up to your Voodoo2 however.
About the only thing this is illustrating is that the performance problems with D3D are pretty severe now. DX couldn't correctly render fog or water in the original Half-Done(tm) engine, and going to OpenGL drivers would not only boost the frame rate by as much as 66%, but would also correctly render those effects.
Also, RTFA, Nvidia is a little shy about "optimized" drivers for benchmarking certain applications. They specifically requested that the optimized drivers not be used. No indication that ATI did the same.
I doubt there will be a Linux version of HL2 either, because this new 3D engine appears to only support DirectX.
That's a shame, because the world didn't end with the America's Army developers ported AA:O to Linux. As a matter of fact, it runs quite well, and it didn't take them 5 years to produce nothing but vaporware.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
You seem to have forgotten the ugly step-child, the NV1 - the first chipset produced by nVidia. I had it in the form of the Diamond Edge 3D 3400 XL.
It was the strangest video card that I've seen to date. It had 2 ports for Sega Saturn controllers, and an onboard sound card for wavetable MIDI. The 3D rendering was proprietary and it only supported a few games like Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter. Only years later did they come out with drivers that actually did DirectX, and then it was sort of a DirectX wrapper and hardly worked at all. That card, was BUTT UGLY!
If you want to see an example of it's wonderful graphics, BYTE still has a report up.
You'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them?
Taken from the Catalyst 3.7 driver release notes:
The CATALYST(TM) software suite is designed to support the following ATI desktop product family:
* RADEON(TM) 9800 series
* RADEON(TM) 9700 series
* RADEON(TM) 9600 series
* RADEON(TM) 9500 series
* RADEON(TM) 9200 series
* RADEON(TM) 9100 series
* RADEON(TM) 9000 series
* RADEON(TM) 8500 series
* RADEON(TM) 7500 series
* RADEON(TM) 7200 series
* RADEON(TM) 7000 series
How many generations of hardware does that represent?
That is just plain wrong. You used to be able to notice the difference between 1600X1200 and 1024X768 easily. Now that AA is around, the difference has blurred somewhat.
I run all of my games at 1600X1200 if I can get at least decent performance. Everything scales for the screen, looking the same size as everything on 1024X768, only much smoother. Higher resolutions also will allow for higher amounts of detail, if care has been given in that direction. You've got more pixels to play with, so you could render 1,000 more leaves on that tree, or render more pock-marks into that wooden doorway.
The only reason why you would think that 1600X1200 makes everything small is because of the sore state of the desktop. This is getting fixed, As referenced here, with SVG. Now, we just have to have the window graphics and fonts done with SVG, and we would all be in high res heaven.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.